How do you manage and organize your digital photos?
Here at ISEEK we frequently speak about backing up your data and photos. It’s for a good reason. We all have thousands of photos on our computers that are unnamed, untagged, and just not sorted. Here is how to start rectifying this.
Organise when you import them: Ensure everything has a tag, name or date when you are importing from your smart phone or Camera. Furthermore go through and delete the bad ones like; those floor or wall shots, blurry faces and the occasional horrible ‘selfie’.
Naming your photos and files: this will help searching later on. Be more specific with the file name, instead of ‘Sophie’s graduation’, name the file ‘Sophie Graduation 16 September 2015’. The more details the better for searching in the future years to come.
Tagging photos: Now this is different to naming. You can tag locations with Geo-tagging once enabled on your smartphone or tablet devices. This can come in handy for when you want to bring up photos from a certain location, and especially helpful for dealing with vacation or photos of a night out on the town. Note that you can turn off the location feature if you don’t want that shared.
Backup location options: External hard drives are perfect but remember they are a mechanical device and will be susceptible to wear and tear. USB’s are another alternative, but make sure you keep them in a safe place. You can also backup to your Cloud storage, but just be aware of your data limits as this can become pricey if you have a lot of data to back up. The good thing with Cloud storage though is that you can access it from anywhere and on any electronic device, dependent on internet connection of course. For those really important photos we recommend that you also burn a DVD/CD as a digital hard copy, but make sure you do label them!
With the choices available to us today there is NO excuse, put this task on your list of ‘to do’s’ or book a one on one training session with ISEEK to learn how to do it if that’s what’s holding you back. Remember once you lose them you can’t get them back. Me, well I am extra cautious and actually have a secondary external hard drive backed up and stored at a relative’s home just in case!
Ultimately, staying organized is your best bet and once you have a system in place you won’t feel like it is a daunting task to do any more, who knows you may even go back and look at them every once and a while.
As always, if you need more advice, don’t hesitate to contact your local IT professional.